Dirty White Boys

by Stephen Hunter

  He felt the eyes on him again and looked up at the house, wondering if even now Lamar Pye weren’t squinting over a gunsight at him. But he quelled the feeling, walked back to his truck, and called it in. Half an hour later, the response came: The car, registered to a Sonny Red Bear, could not be linked to criminal activities, and no trace of criminal records, either local or federal, could be found for either Sonny Red Bear or any of his family. Just then the door burst open, and Bud saw what had scurried so mysteriously behind the doors of the little house: It was a mess of kids, squalling and seething, led to the car by a handsome woman. The children crammed in any which way, and she got in and drove off.

  Bud played a hunch.

  “Dispatch, can you ten-forty-three the name Red Bear for a State of Oklahoma daycare license?”

  “Got you, six-oh-five.”

  He waited and then it came back that, yes, one Carla Red Bear had applied to the state for just such a daycare license, though its issuance was pending.

  “You got a violation to report there, six-oh-five?”

  Bud paused. Was a time, yes, he’d report any violation. The law was rigid and unshaded and it was meant not to be violated, whether the issue was speed limit or murder. And he was a rigid man. Or at least he used to be. But today he wasn’t out here for any business other than Lamar Pye. He’d cut the Red Bears some slack and maybe it would come back to him in some way.

  “Naw, Dispatch, just curious. I’m ten-twenty-four here, and out.”

  “Got you, six-oh-five.”

  Other than that, there was no excitement as Bud prowled the byways of the third, then the fourth, then the fifth county over the next few days in search of the three car models in their appropriate years. He threw himself into the hunt so because he knew that it represented an escape from It.

  And so it was finally, on the sixth day, a Tuesday of the following week, when he was nearing the end of his list, that he reached an address on a rural route near Altus, in Kiowa County.

  He paused at the entrance to the road in, and ten-twenty-threed his location. It was a barren part of Oklahoma, and the raw wind whistled across the rolling prairie. He could see the house a mile in, clapboard, old and peely, with its constellation of attendant lesser structures. Behind, the mountains stuck out of the earth, and here and there snaggy mesquite trees clawed at the sky or a parcel of scrub oaks nestled like drinking buffalo around a creek. He headed in, checking once again to make sure of the registration of the car, a Toyota Tercel, and the name of the owner: Tull, Ruta Beth.

  CHAPTER

  19

  Lamar would never admit defeat or even disappointment. Still, $4,567.87 wasn’t exactly a huge sum, given what they’d had to go through to get it.

  “Now, maybe it ain’t a lot,” he said, “but it ain’t a little either. Not by a damn sight. Why, there’s lots of places to go, lots of places to see, on almost five thousand dollars.”

  But the truth was, Ruta Beth had over nine thousand dollars inherited from her beloved late mother and daddy already in a bank account, which she was willing to just fork over to Lamar.

  “Ruta Beth, that wouldn’t be right. You just don’t give money to a person, even though you love him.”

  “It would be right if I said so,” she said.

  “Well, maybe come a rainy day, that money’ll help out. In fact, maybe we’ll borrow against it, though I can’t but guess they’d have the serial numbers recorded.”

  “That would make Mother and Daddy happy,” Ruta Beth said.

  Lamar smiled. Still, he was secretly upset. A night or two after the robbery, when the little family was gathered around the TV at the news hour, watching for the latest on their own celebrity, a flashy black man came on and said, “Some are calling the Pyes the boldest gang to come out of Oklahoma since the thirties, when Pretty Boy Floyd roared out of the Cookson hills and lit up America with his desperado ways. But what Pretty Boy had in style and substance, this gang makes up for in sheer firepower. And dumb luck. They are the gang that could shoot straight but couldn’t think straight—the horrifying face of modern crime.”

  Lamar brooded silently on this for a bit, until his anger at last came welling out during the weather. He suddenly started bellowing like an enraged father.

  “All this goddamn shit about Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde and Johnny Dillinger and how great they were! It’s shit, I tell you. What we done, we done better’n them old boys, by a goddamn cocksucking mile.” His outburst quieted them all, even Odell, who was working on a big bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats. Lamar seemed to have it back under control, but a vein on his head suddenly began to throb. And then Lamar got tooting again.

  “In them days,” he said earnestly, looking at Richard, “in them days, the police didn’t have nothing. The radios had a range of about ten feet, when they worked, fingerprints was brand spanking new and had to be hand-catalogued by clerks, there weren’t no computers, the cars was slow, they didn’t have no Magnum pistols, your biggest gun was your .44 Special, they didn’t have no helicopters, no infrared, no fax, no nothing. Hell, the FBI in them days was nothing but another gang, with machine guns and BARs. Nobody did hard time in a joint where all the niggers was uppity. Why hell, any goddamned body could have been a desperado. Now look what we got to contend with. Look what we went through to get a lousy five grand. I’m telling you, no Charlie Floyd, no Bonnie Parker, no goddamned Johnny Dillinger could have pulled off what we pulled off. We don’t get no credit. They’re saying we were just goddamned lucky. Well sir, lot more to it than luck, by goddamn God. Yes sir. Yes sir.”

  He sat there, seething.

  “You should write that boy a letter, Lamar,” said Ruta Beth.

  “No ma’am. Another way of how come our type is better than them old-timey ones. The cops been using that trick for years. Go on the radio or the TV and disrespect an honest job of thieving, so that the thief goes and gits himself all smoked up, and pulls a rash job or sends a letter or something. No sir, what we have is self-control. I guarantee you. We are goddamned serious.”

  Then he got up and went outside. They heard the Toyota start up and leave the farm.

  “Daddy is upset,” said Ruta Beth.

  “Set,” said Odell.

  “He has a right to be upset,” said Richard. “I wish I had a surprise or something to give him so that he would feel better.”

  It was a wonderful idea!

  “A surprise!” exclaimed Ruta Beth in joy. “Odell, has anyone done give Daddy a surprise?”

  Odell’s face went slack as he contemplated this problem. For minutes his eyes registered NO OCCUPANCY, but at last he found a kernel of information to impart, took a deep breath and tried to find the way into speech. His face mottled with effort. The suspense grew. He looked like he might explode. But finally, he said, “No prise!”

  “Whooee,” squealed Ruta Beth. “Let’s give him a surprise then.”

  “A cake,” said Richard, who had himself always fantasized about a surprise party when he was a child.

  “We ain’t got no cake,” said Ruta Beth.

  “Gake, gake,” said Odell.

  In Odell’s mind there was a memory of cake, too. He remembered:

  Way back old time. Mama sing. Mama kiss. Cake! Softee sweet, on fire. “Happy birthyday to you, happy birthyday to you-oo, happy birthyday to Odell, happy birthyday to you.” Mama so nice. Cakey good! So long ago!

  “You hush now, Odell honey, there ain’t no cake. We’ll make do with something. Come on.”

  The merry band went into the kitchen. They opened the cabinets and, indeed, could find no cake. But Odell did quickly spot a can of store-bought vanilla frosting. He liked to spread it on bread.

  “Fros! FROS!” he said urgently, pointing, his whole face turning red in the effort.

  “Oh, Dell, honey, that’s wonderful,” said Ruta Beth.

  Odell smiled.

  “You could put that on something,” said Richard. “It wouldn’t be a
cake. But it would be Sort of a cake.”

  “Well, I’d like to have a real cake,” said Ruta Beth. “It’s a damned shame we ain’t got no cake.”

  “Could you bake one?”

  “No time.”

  But Odell was not through yet. He began jumping up and down with excitement and pointing. His face lit with frustration as he tried to find the words to present what was clearly the most complex thought his brain had ever attempted to generate. His eyes rolled. His tongue fought in his mouth for fluidity.

  He was putting two pictures together in his mind.

  Ed + Fros = Cake.

  How could he get them to understand?

  “Ed,” he was saying, knowing that somehow it was wrong. The harder he tried, the more angry at himself he got. Sometimes he wanted to rip out his own eyes and tongue for being so different. The pressure rose as he tried to form the word!

  “Ed. ED!”

  “Ed?” said Richard. “Ruta Beth, do you know what he’s trying to say?”

  “No idea,” she said. “Odell, honey, you go slow and try and say all the letters.”

  Odell made an effort to calm himself. When he at last seized control of his own voice, he spat out the word “Bed.”

  Bed? thought Richard.

  “Bread,” shouted Ruta Beth. “Yes, Richard, he’s saying bread.”

  The excitement was intolerable. Richard felt it himself. Yes. What was a cake but bread with sugar? Well … why not put some sugar on a nice loaf of bread, then cover it with frosting. Wouldn’t that be sort of like a cake?

  “We can do it!” he shouted, exalted. “We can do it.”

  Odell smiled rapturously as Ruta Beth kissed him and “Wi-chud” gave him a manly clap on the shoulder.

  Eagerly, they set to work. Richard’s artistic talents came to the fore. One problem was that, shed of its wrapper, the loaf of bread kept separating into slices. It was Richard’s brainstorm to pierce it with uncooked spaghetti strands to provide a kind of internal discipline that would hold it together. Odell didn’t have the patience to spread the frosting, but it turned out that Richard didn’t either, even with his art training. It fell to Ruta Beth. With her eyes squinted and her tiny face knitted up like an angry fist, she dabbed the frosting on the sugary bread a dollop at a time. When she was finally done, by God it did look like a cake!

  “Gake! Gake!” shouted Odell.

  He began to sing, “Py birfee, a-py birfee.”

  “We need candles,” said Richard. “Candles would really make it work.”

  “Suppose it ain’t his birthday? Or suppose he’s one of them that don’t like to be ‘minded of his age?” Ruta Beth asked darkly.

  But Richard held firm. “No, it should have candles,” he said. “I think we can take it on principle that Lamar is the sort of man who’d see the necessity for the ceremony.”

  His will held sway. They had no birthday candles, of course, but they did find some candles kept in case the power went out. Richard cut them up and wedged them, like carrot stumps, into the frosting. When they were done, it looked pretty much like a cake. But something was missing.

  Richard tried to guess what. It just looked sort of disappointing. The frosting was white, somewhat unevenly applied, but mainly it was that the shape of the loaf of bread wasn’t obscured enough. It just looked like a loaf of bread smeared with frosting.

  “We can do better than that,” he said.

  Then he knew.

  “It needs … a lion!”

  Everybody agreed that this was a wonderful idea. Richard set to work. Quickly he located supplies: peanut butter to etch the face, two raisins for eyes, smashed bits of Frito to form the mane. Steadily he worked, as the other two hovered over him in the small, warm kitchen. At first it was chaos. But Richard had invested so much over the weeks in lions that he was able to bring the shape out from nothingness, just seem to demand that it emerge from the swirls of peanut butter. And the liquidity of the peanut butter as a medium was interesting: somehow it was more naturally akin to the texture of muscle that he had had so much trouble getting into his drawings. The body-form just seemed to define itself out of the glop, powerful and radiant, vibrant with predatory muscularity. It pleased him.

  Slowly, like a Mediterranean mosaicist adding his last few tiles, he built the Fritos into a mane. Then he added the two raisins. They were too big. It looked stupid. Then he saw a half-opened package of Oreo cookies; Odell liked to pry the Oreos apart and lick the frosting off. He took a cookie out, broke it into bits, and found two of approximately the right size that looked like eyes. Carefully, he placed this last detail where it belonged.

  “Wi-on! Wi-on!” shouted Odell.

  “Lordy be,” said Ruta Beth. “It do look a lot like a lion.”

  Just then, they heard the car pull into the yard. Lamar parked near the barn, then ambled toward the house.

  “Git ready for a su-prise!” called Ruta Beth.

  Lamar climbed to the porch, opened the door, and stared at the candles glowing in the dark.

  “Now what the hell—”

  “SURPRISE,” shouted Ruta Beth, Richard, and Odell simultaneously, leaping from the corners of the kitchen at Lamar in the split second after Ruta Beth had turned on the lights.

  For the first time in his life, Lamar stood agape. His mouth fell open. He looked at them dancing merrily in the kitchen and at the thing they had made for him.

  Then he started to cry.

  “That’s the goddamned prettiest thing I ever saw,” he said. “Oh my, oh my, oh my, how you have made me proud today. That’s the goddamned best surprise a man could get! And a lion on it! Richard, boy, I know your work, that’s you! Oh, it’s so goddamned nice!”

  “Gake! Gake!” shouted Odell.

  “Well, let’s up and have us a piece,” said Lamar.

  “Lamar, it ain’t a real cake. It may not taste like much,” said Ruta Beth.

  “Well, damn, I’d say it’s as real as a cake could get, Ruta Beth.” He bent to cut it, but Odell yelled “Kwan-dul, kwandul.”

  “Candle,” said Richard. “He is saying, Blow out the candle. Make a wish.”

  Obediently, Lamar blew out the candle.

  “What’d you wish for?” Ruta Beth wanted to know.

  “For us always to be this happy,” he said. He cut the cake into four pieces, the knife in his big fists, the FUCK and the Y O U! blazing off his knuckles, and passed the pieces out, for the birthday boy always hands out the cake. And if they sort of closed their eyes and let the sugary bread run in with the frosting, it did taste like real cake. There wasn’t but a dime’s worth of difference between the two of them.

  So it was that Lamar woke strangely happy the next morning. He had started scraping the house for its new coat of paint, but somehow he didn’t feel like it. They all needed to chill after the rush of the robbery. It would be a good day to take it easy. He wanted to check the far field, which Ruta Beth said her daddy had once dreamed of planting with alfalfa, but he wasn’t quite sure if he wanted to plan that far ahead. It would be a shame to start something so ambitious and then have to let it go for one reason or another. Odell was up watching the early morning cartoons on the TV, which he never missed, and Ruta Beth was messing around in the kitchen. Richard was still sleeping, of course.

  So Lamar went out to the creek that ran between Ruta Beth’s and the McGillavery’s place. He was trying to think of another job. A job that would light up Oklahoma like the goddamned Fourth of July. But it was hard with this crew. They’d just managed to skip by on the Denny’s and had been lucky, as that goddamned TV nigger had said; suppose that damned woman had hit him, instead of missing? It was probably Richard’s scream that made her miss. Richard wasn’t much good at nothing, but the scream had helped probably more than it had hurt. Lamar didn’t like to think how close he’d come to buying the ranch, even with a little .380. Goddamn, old Ruta Beth had been faster than Odell on the return fire. Wasn’t she a peach?

 
But—what kind of a new job were they capable of? You needed a really hard crew to bring off something fancy. Richard could drive, he and Odell could handle the heavy stuff, and Ruta Beth could tail-gun. That was about all that was available. He now saw that going in without leaving someone in the car was a big mistake. Almost got them all killed. So he tried to think of something they could do. Another Denny’s? Nah. Maybe a grocery market or the big PX at Fort Sill. Or what about something that nobody had ever done—say, a whole mall? Wouldn’t that be something: the whole goddamned thing! Or a rodeo? Had anyone ever robbed a rodeo? What about one of them casinos the Indians had built on their tribal property. Or a high-stakes bingo game?

  Lamar sat back, dreaming of the glory of it all, mightily pleased. So much was possible. Two months ago he’d been just another con in the grim hole of the Mac with nothing to look forward to except trying to hold on to what he had. Now look: He had a family! He had a family! He hadn’t worked it out just yet, but if they could do two or three more scores, big ones, then maybe they could lie low. Maybe buy a camper and go to Florida or something. Lamar had never seen Florida. He had an image of beaches and water and palm trees. He could imagine Odell splashing in the water and Richard drawing and Ruta Beth just staring at him in that hard way she had, as if she were trying to suck his soul out of him through her eyes. How that girl could stare! Anyhow, he imagined them happy, happy always.